Description

This attack aims to manipulate non-final public variables used in mobile code by injecting malicious values on it, mostly in Java and C++ applications.

When a public member variable or class used in mobile code isn’t declared as final, its values can be maliciously manipulated by any function that has access to it in order to extend the application code or acquire critical information about the application.

Risk Factors

TBD

Examples

A Java applet from a certain application is acquired and subverted by an attacker. Then, he makes the victim accept and run a Trojan or malicious code that was prepared to manipulate non-final objects’ state and behavior. This code is instantiated and executed continuously using default JVM on the victim’s machine. When the victim invokes the Java applet from the original application using the same JVM, the malicious process could be mixed with original applet, thus it modifies values of non-final objects and executes under victim’s credentials.

In the following example, the class “any_class” is declared as final and “server_addr” variable is not: